Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music

Author(s): Jeff Smith

Source: Music and the Moving Image , Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 1-25
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/musimoviimag.2.1.0001

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From Music and the Moving Image Vol. 2, Issue 1.

Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music
Jeff Smith

ABSTRACT

This article offers an alternative model for conceptualizing the boundary between diegetic and nondiegetic music in film.
Most attempts to explain this phenomenon falter because they take this distinction to be solely an effect of a film's
narration and focus largely on the spectator's apprehension of music's diegetic or nondiegetic status. Instead, concepts
like Robynn Stillwell's "fantastical gap" might be viewed more productively through a lens that combines three interrelated,
but nonetheless theoretically separable, issues: the music's relation to narrative space, the film narration's self-
consciousness and communicativeness, and the music's aural fidelity. To illustrate the utility of a model that considers all
three of these as factors, I employ several examples where the apparent ambiguity of music's relation to narrative space
can be explained by the manipulation of aural fidelity, the use of spatially displaced sound, and the momentary
suppression of information characteristic of film narration's communicativeness.

Editors note: Jeff Smith developed this article from the keynote address he delivered at the 2008 conference Music and
the Moving Image at New York University's Department of Music and the Performing Arts Professions.

I'd like to begin my essay by making a simple observation: the 2008 Music and Moving Image Conference offered further
proof, if any was needed, that film music studies has come of age. This wave of scholarship was initiated by Claudia
Gorbman's (1987) pathbreaking study of music in narrative filmmaking, Unheard Melodies, which inspired many scholars
in both cinema studies and musicology to follow in its footsteps. 1 Since then, the field of film music studies has grown
exponentially, with authors such as Caryl Flinn, Royal S. Brown, Kathryn Kalinak, Philip Tagg, Gillian Anderson, Martin
Marks, K. J. Donnelly, Annahid Kassabian, Carol Vernallis, and Daniel Goldmark producing important monographs on the
subject. 2 Furthermore, in recent years, this intellectual ferment has reached a critical mass, with no fewer than four
scholarly journals devoted to the study of music and media, and two series of books in the works at major university
presses.

Yet film music studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field drawing concepts, categories, and theoretical premises
from a variety of other domains, including philosophy, psychology, semiotics, literary criticism, cultural studies, and even
marketing research. This interdisciplinarity is undoubtedly important for the overall health of the field, but it also entails
certain risks. The potential for conceptual and terminological confusion is one such risk because scholars tend to use
language in ways that are consistent with the rubrics established within their home discipline. Moreover, as film music
scholars build on established theories, they often develop new related concepts and categories that adumbrate and
expand some of the most basic premises of the field.

The diegetic/nondiegetic couplet is a case in point. This conceptual distinction regarding music's relation to
narrative space is one of the cornerstones of film music theory, yet it is arguably also a concept that has been somewhat
loosely defined, applied with an intuitive sense of its boundaries and functions rather than with theoretical and
methodological precision. Moreover, the relation between diegetic and nondiegetic music has given rise to several related
terms and concepts, including the extradiegetic, the metadiegetic, the ambidiegetic, and even "scource music" as a term
employed within the industry by practitioners.

Film music theorists have long understood a general relation between diegetic and nondiegetic music as particular
types of musical phenomena within the cinema. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, for example, call attention to the
practice of providing visual justification for music as one of the bad habits and prejudices that they enumerate in
Composing for the Films, first published in 1947. Adorno and Eisler describe the use of source music as artless and
contrived, and suggest that a director typically uses it to hide the semiotic poverty and emotional emptiness implied by
silence. The threadbare artifice of source music is deemed especially problematic because it "hinders the use of music as
genuine contrast" and reduces music to the status of an "acoustical stage property."3

As James Buhler notes, though, in his own discussion of the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music,
the concepts received new critical attention after being introduced by Gorbman, who defined diegetic music as "music that
1

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(apparently) issues from a source within the narrative."4 Buhler 5 argues that subsequent film music scholars have not
appreciated Gorbman's contribution in that they have taken the categories of diegetic and nondiegetic music to be roughly
synonymous with the industry's own designations of source music and background score. These conceptual commonalities
obscured Gorbman's key move as a theorist; namely, that she redefined a relationship between music and image (i.e.,
whether or not musicians or musical technologies were shown producing the sound) as being one of music and narrative
(i.e., whether the music exists within the same space as the characters and objects that make up a film's fictional world).

Adhering to the principle of Occam's razor that states that when you have two competing theories the simpler is
the better, I propose that we retain the very straightforward and seemingly uncomplicated definition of diegetic music
initially offered by Gorbman. This definition not only has the value of parsimony, but, as I will demonstrate, it also
preserves the distinction between narrative and narration that is obscured in the work of more recent film music theorists.
More importantly, though, this clarification allows us to focus on a more pertinent issue; namely, how information about
music's spatial status is communicated to spectators. In what follows, I explore the issue of diegetic and nondiegetic music
along three axes. First of all, I review some basic principles of film narrative and film narration to refine the concept of
diegetic music that currently circulates among film music scholars. Secondly, I review some recent work on the question of
diegetic and nondiegetic music to identify some of the ways these theories depart from the principles initially established
by Gorbman. Finally, I identify three particular analytical issues that can help to clarify the relation between music and
narrative space: (1) diegetic music's aural fidelity to its source, (2) diegetic music's relation to narrative space, and (3)
diegetic music's relation to the communicativeness of a film's narration.

A Brief Word about Music and Diegesis

In presenting her own definition of diegetic music, Gorbman drew on the narratological theories of Gérard Genette
and Étienne Souriau. As one of the French filmologues of the 1950s, Souriau defined film diegesis as "all that belongs, 'by
inference,' to the narrated story, to the world proposed or supposed by the film's fiction." 6 Genette drew on Souriau's
definition, but also established a more precise understanding of the difference between diegesis and story. Commenting
on Souriau's earlier formulation, Genette writes, " … diégèse is indeed a universe rather than a train of events (a story);
the diégèse is therefore not the story but the universe in which the story takes place--universe in the somewhat limited
(and wholly relative) sense in which we say that Stendhal is not in the same universe as Fabrice." 7

Genette's work proved to be extremely influential in film studies, not only shaping Gorbman's work on film music,
but also more specific studies of film narratology and narration. In Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell
synthesizes Genette's work on narrative discourse with Russian neoformalist theory to produce a constructivist account of
spectators' comprehension of film narratives. Expanding considerably upon Souriau's notion of "by inference," Bordwell
argues8 that viewers take an active role in constructing a narrative (in Russian neoformalist terms, a fabula) on the basis
of cues and information provided through the film's syuzhet. According to Bordwell, the syuzhet encompasses all of the
images and sounds that constitute cinematic signification, whereas the fabula is an abstracted series of events
reconstructed by spectators in linear sequential order and that, in classical cinema, have clear causal linkages. Because it
involves spectators' inferences, the fabula is usually a more expansive concept than the syuzhet because the fabula
includes all of the characters, places, objects, and events referred to in the film, even those that are not explicitly
represented.

The narratological theories of Souriau, Genette, and Bordwell have important consequences for our understanding
of the relation between music and narrative space, even if those lessons have been largely forgotten since the publication
of Gorbman's Unheard Melodies. For one thing, this earlier scholarship provides a welcome reminder that nondiegetic
music ("pit music" or commentative music in the words of many film music scholars) belongs solely to the syuzhet. Source
music (i.e., the industry term for music that is performed on screen or emanates from a jukebox or radio) is part of both
the fabula and syuzhet to the extent that it is both heard by the characters in the film and is audibly represented as part
of its images and sounds. In contrast, though, diegetic music also includes pieces of music that we must infer on the basis
of cues provided by the syuzhet. In Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), for example, April's assertion that she goes limp at
the end of La Traviata makes Verdi's opera a piece of diegetic music in the film even though it is never audibly
represented. Similarly, in film biographies of composers, we assume that the film's diegesis includes the totality of the
subject's work whether or not it is explicitly mentioned. Thus, Mozart's opera, Idomeneo, is a piece of diegetic music in
Amadeus (1984) even though no one ever discusses it or performs it on screen. In such instances, these pieces of music
are solely part of the fabula and are not part of the film's syuzhet.

In sketching out these different types of relations between music and narrative space, we might summarize the
results as follows:

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 Diegetic
Nondiegetic
Source Music Music
Music
(implied)

Referenced
Scores/"pit Musical
or inferred
music" performances
pieces

Syuzhet Syuzhet/fabula Fabula

Table 1.

Of course, filmmakers sometimes blur the boundaries between diegetic music and extradiegetic music. Krzysztof
Kieslowski's films frequently refer to a fictional composer from the Netherlands, named Van den Budenmayer. The
snatches of music by Budenmayer that appear in Kieslowski's films are actually written by film composer Zbigniew
Preisner, but, within the fictional worlds of The Decalogue (1988) or Three Colors: Red (1994), that music belongs to
Budenmayer. Similarly, in Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine (1998), several songs written and recorded by the groups Roxy
Music and the Stooges appear as pieces attributed to the fictitious rock stars Brian Slade and Curt Wild, respectively.
Thus, although fans might recognize "H2B" or "Ladytron" as songs from Roxy Music's eponymous debut, the band simply
does not exist as part of the fictional universe of Velvet Goldmine. Complicating things even further, when Haynes
includes Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain" as nondiegetic accompaniment to a montage sequence depicting the plans of
Slade's manager to make him a star, the band appears to be a part of the film's syuzhet but not its fabula.

Recent Discussions of the Boundary between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music

While the issue of analyzing diegetic and nondiegetic music remains a focal point of film music theory, two
particular essays by David Neumeyer and Robynn Stilwell have done much to sketch the contours of current thinking on
the topic. 9 Building upon the work of his frequent collaborator, James Buhler, Neumeyer locates the issue of designating
diegetic and nondiegetic music within a concept of the "integrated sound track." 10 Citing its stylistic and narrative
complexity, Neumeyer suggests that the integrated sound track established a distinction between the image and sound
among industry professionals that superseded the dichotomy between source music and background music. The
"integrated sound track," according to Neumeyer, became "an artistic requirement for sound editors, and musicians as a
result were able to exploit various kinds of ambiguity in 'spatial anchoring.'"11

By emphasizing the role of the integrated sound track, Neumeyer seeks to displace the priority given to the
distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music by identifying it as merely one category for film music analysis among
a much longer list of binary pairs. Neumeyer's network of interactive binary pairs includes the following:

Diegetic/nondiegetic (or source/background) 12

On screen/off screen
Vocal/instrumental: performance forces
Rerecording: synchronized/not synchronized
Sound levels: "Realistic"/unrealistic (for diegetic music); loud/soft (for nondiegetic music)
Musically continuous/discontinuous
Musically closed/open
Formal interaction of cutting and music: yes/no
Motivation, or narrative plausibility: yes/no
"Pure"/culturally or cinematically coded

Neumeyer's list offers an excellent tool kit for film music analysts, but in seeking to displace the priority given to
diegetic and nondiegetic, he evades the central problematic entailed by his otherwise excellent discussion of the issue;
3

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namely, how we define diegetic music. Although Neumeyer offers a thoughtful and incisive discussion of the ways in
which critical discussions of diegetic and nondiegetic deviate from the industry's own designation of "visual" music and
"background" music that were in common parlance on cue sheets, he more or less accepts the field's normative definition
of diegetic music that sees it as an aspect of cinematic realism. Citing Christian Metz's definition of spatial anchoring as a
measure of the degree to which "a recorded sound is 'attached' to its object," Neumeyer treats "diegetic-ness" and
"realism" as synonymous concepts.

Neumeyer's acceptance of this principle is certainly consistent with the rest of film music and film sound studies.
Summarizing the work of several other scholars, Morris B. Holbrook writes, "Such commentators generally assume that
diegetic music serves primarily to reinforce the realistic depiction of the mise-en-scÏne so as to enhance the verisimilitude
of the narrative action in a manner comparable to that achieved by appropriate costumes, dÿcor, scenery, or
landscaping."13

Yet nowhere else in film studies is the notion of the "diegetic" wholly equated with a concept of realism. Elements
of mise-en-scÏne or cinematography, for example, are often treated in a highly stylized fashion, but a film's departure from
realism does not disqualify spaces and objects from being considered a part of the film's diegesis. The expressionist
design of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), for example, departs from almost any definition of cinematic realism that one
might mobilize, but it would be strange indeed to argue that Caligari's asylum exists outside of the world of the fiction,
even if that fiction is merely the one spun by Francis to an auditor on a park bench as depicted in the film's framing
sequence (Figure 1). Similarly, it would be equally absurd to suggest that Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo are situated outside
of Midnight Cowboy's (1969) diegesis on the grounds that the use of a telephoto lens has thrown both the foreground and
background planes of the image out of focus, something that would never occur in the optics of the real world (Figure 2).
To take an even more extreme example, those gooseberry bushes in Dogville (2003) remain a part of the diegesis even
though they are rendered as chalk outlines (Figure 3). By divorcing the concept of the diegetic from the "realistic," we can
reformulate our definition of diegetic music in the following way. Realistic sound levels are, thus, a sufficient condition for
diegetic music on an integrated sound track, but they are hardly a necessary condition.

Figure 1.

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 Figure 2.

Figure 3.

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 More recently, Robynn Stilwell has taken up the question of the relation between diegetic and nondiegetic music
by positing a kind of border space between those two categories that she suggestively labels the "fantastical gap." While
Stilwell admits that the vast majority of musical phenomena in film can be easily placed on one side of the boundary
space or the other, she also argues that a lot of examples fall into a destabilized and ambiguous zone that exists between
the world of the story and the cinematic apparatus. More importantly, Stilwell also argues that the liminal space between
diegetic and nondiegetic is one that filmmakers can productively exploit in ways that allow music to suggest complex
emotional states and psychological affinities with characters.

While Stilwell's efforts to theorize this fantastical gap open up film music analysis in provocative new directions,
her model for this zone of indeterminacy relies on a couple of questionable assumptions that mitigate the widespread
applicability of her concept. First of all, Stilwell bases her argument about the fantastical gap on an understanding of film
in relation to theater as a historical antecedent:

The frame of the screen becomes the proscenium arch; the incidental music rises from the orchestra in the
pit below and in front of the stage--the musicians are heard but not seen by the audience. The conductor
can see the stage and respond to the action and mood, but the characters do not acknowledge the
presence of musicians at their feet, even if they perform with them during a musical number… 14

Here Stilwell clearly acknowledges the notion of pit music as a model for background orchestral music in cinema, but
conveniently ignores the fact that music and other sounds in theater are produced in a live environment with its own
acoustic profile, whereas music and other sounds in the cinema are recorded in the abstracted aural space of the
recording studio. The latter is an important precondition for the way music effects its apparent transition between diegetic
and nondiegetic spaces. More importantly, however, the fact that music is recorded also enables it to take up much more
complex relations with other sounds in the audio mix of a film's sound track. Because it is part of a recorded medium, film
music--to use a more appropriately cinematic metaphor--moves easily from background to foreground in the film's
soundscape in a manner that is quite different from the typical sound design found in live theater. 15 Moreover, music can
also move from a condition in which it is marked by the echo, resonance, and acoustic profile of the space in which it is
played to one in which music exists within the idealized space of the studio where those diegetic marks are gradually
effaced.

Besides the problem with a false analogy with theater, Stilwell also runs into some difficulties by overemphasizing
the phenomenal experience of spectators as a ground for her understanding of the fantastical gap. Writing about the
music of The Winter Guest (1997), which reveals at film's end that the solo piano underscore heard throughout was
played by character in the story, Stilwell says,

We can certainly make the argument that the music was always diegetic. But the ability to retroactively
classify the entire score of The Winter Guest as diegetic--or, similarly, when we are able, in hindsight, to
differentiate the diegetic and nondiegetic on the approach to Skull Island--does not defuse the destabilizing
effect of experiencing the shift of perception. The fullness and pervasiveness of the music of The Winter
Guest leads us to understand it as nondiegetic. 16

Stilwell raises an important point about the spectator's comprehension of the way in which diegetic and nondiegetic music
works in the cinema, but it is hardly the only point that can be made and, indeed, may more properly be considered as an
effect of film narration rather than as a condition of the narrative per se. It is worth remembering here that the fabula of
The Winter Guest (or of any film, for that matter) is a construct created by the spectator on the basis of cues provided
through the film's syuzhet. As such, the question of whether a piece of music is diegetic is ultimately a question about the
fabula and is logically separable from the question of how that information is communicated to spectators. 17 By
emphasizing the spectator's phenomenal experience of the fantastical gap, Stilwell's discussion collapses the distinction
between narrative and narration in a manner that preserves the fuzzy boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic music
while contradictorily acknowledging that the music's ultimate status in The Winter Guest proves to be self-evident.

Diegetic Music and Aural Fidelity

As defined by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, fidelity "refers to the extent to which the sound is faithful to
the source as we conceive it."18 Bordwell and Thompson are quite careful to point out that fidelity is purely a matter of
expectation and has nothing to do with a sound's actual source in production. These expectations are governed by a
larger set of norms and conventions that comprise a sense of aural realism. Chief among these techniques are the
matching of a sound's volume to shot scale; the manipulation of volume to suggest the shifting spatial relations of a
sound's source to its implied auditor; the use of room tone, reverb, and echo to imply a sonic event's occurrence within a
real-world space; and the manipulation of a sound's frequency range to suggest its origination from ordinary, household
6

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sound technologies, such as the handset of a telephone, the speaker of a car radio, or the headphones of an iPod.

The issue of fidelity is one that is obviously pertinent to the way in which a film communicates music's diegetic
status, and undoubtedly overlaps with Neumeyer's list of interactive binary pairs. The identification of music as being on
screen or off screen, its synchronization with its source, its sound levels, its narrative plausibility, its formal continuity, and
the issue of performance forces all contribute to the impression of music as being faithful to its depicted or imputed
source. Moreover, as I noted earlier, the combination of these characteristics can be sufficient to suggest that a piece of
music is a part of the film's diegesis.

But the issue of aural fidelity is hardly necessary for the identification of music as something that exists within the
world of the film. Many scholars acknowledge that soundscapes in films adhere to a very loose notion of aural fidelity in
the construction of a scene. Sound levels often remain quite stable despite radical shifts in camera distance and angle.
The levels of particular sound effects may be drastically lowered from one shot to the next in order to prioritize a scene's
dialogue. Moreover, the aural fidelity of sounds may be manipulated for expressive purposes or to suggest a character's
psychology. The heightened sensory qualities of the sound effects in David Lynch's Eraserhead (1978) or Matthew
Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) play a vital role in establishing the mood in each film, whereas the manipulation of
aural fidelity in scenes from films as diverse as Possession (1947), The Nutty Professor (1963), and Juno (2007) functions
to communicate a particular character's psychological state. In each of these cases, however, the manipulation of the
sound's aural fidelity does not destabilize its relation to narrative space. Indeed, it would be rather strange to suggest that,
in The Nutty Professor, Julius Kelp's cringing response to the book, the squeal of the chalk, or the gnashing sound of
chewing gum was a response to a nondiegetic sound.

Why, then, do we as film music scholars readily suggest that the manipulation of music's aural fidelity necessarily
suggests a shift from diegetic to nondiegetic? Consider, for example, the following scenes from Agnes Varda's La Pointe
Court (1952) and David Fincher's Zodiac (2007). Varda's film interweaves two stories: one that examines the lives of the
fisherman and villagers who reside in La Pointe Courte, a neighborhood in SÏte; the other is about a young, unnamed
couple who come to visit. In the scene I will discuss, Philippe Noiret's character shows his wife around the village where
he grew up.

In the first shot of the sequence, the close miking of the dialogue seems justified by the relative closeness of the
camera to the subjects, who are photographed in a medium close two shot (Figure 4). In the long shot that follows this,
the dialogue is almost obliterated by the grinding and squeaking sounds of the oncoming train car, which increase in
volume as the car moves inexorably closer to the camera (Figure 5). From this setup, Varda cuts to one whose angle is
almost perpendicular to the one in the previous shot. Once the train car passes, the couple crosses the tracks, but their
dialogue retains its previous sound level, suggesting a sudden mismatch of image and sound perspectives (Figure 6). The
sound's fidelity returns to something closer to our normal expectations in the next shot, which is a medium shot at an
angle that is again roughly perpendicular to the previous setup. The sound level of the dialogue comes closer to matching
the space depicted within the frame while the offscreen squeaks and squeals of the train's wheels diminish in the
background, suggesting its slow movement away from the couple. The camera then arcs around the couple and tracks
backward to capture the couple in a long shot. The couple then turns their backs to the camera and begins to walk away
into the distance. Varda then cuts to an extreme long shot of the couple, whose dialogue is recorded at a sound level that
belies their distance from the camera (Figure 7). This is followed by an even more flagrant mismatch between sound and
space later in the sequence as the couple is shown crossing a field, their bodies dwarfed by the vast expanse of land
around them (Figure 8). Yet the final shot of the sequence returns to a slightly more normative conception of aural fidelity
as the couple gets into a boat that transports them across the river. The splashing sounds caused by the oars might seem
unusual loud in this context, but the volume and echo of the dialogue between the couple and Laurent convey certain
markers of aural fidelity, especially when the volume level of the dialogue diminishes to suggest the boat's movement into
the background space of the shot (Figure 9).

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 Figure 4.

Figure 5.

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 Figure 6.

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 Figure 7.

Figure 8.

10

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 Figure 9.

Compare this sequence with the scene of the young couple being killed that opens Zodiac. At the start of the
scene, the music is quite clearly motivated within the diegesis. This aspect of the sound design is redundantly cued in the
film by inclusion of the disc jockey's patter, Dee's reference to listening to music, and, most importantly, through the
manipulation of high and low frequencies of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (1968) to make it sound appropriate to its
source: the car radio (Figure 10). When the Zodiac killer begins shooting, however, the music suddenly swells in volume
in a manner that departs from any sort of realistic motivation for the sound (Figure 11). Flaunting its manipulation of the
sound elements, Fincher even includes a brief shot of the car radio now spattered with blood (Figure 12). When the
camera tracks back to a long shot of the killer returning to the vehicle to begin firing anew, the music is paradoxically
louder for this setup than it was during any of the shots taken inside the car (Figure 13).

11

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 Figure 10.

Figure 11.

12

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 Figure 12.

Figure 13.

The sudden change in volume might encourage some critics to read the music shifting from diegetic to
nondiegetic. Alternatively, some critics may simply locate the music in the so-called fantastical gap--the zone of ambiguity
cited by Stillwell that is located between those two poles. Yet this kind of interpretive move begs a larger question: why do
we assume that music shifts its status in Zodiac while the sound effects and dialogue in La Pointe Courte remain clearly
within the diegesis? In my view, "Hurdy Gurdy Man" remains anchored within the diegesis throughout the scene, but
departs from conventions of aural fidelity in order to heighten the expressive qualities of the music during the murder itself.
The sudden swell in the volume of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and the attendant shift in mixing levels is little different than the
aural manipulation of dialogue and sound effects heard earlier that are justified on the grounds of narrative intelligibility
13

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and expressivity. Considered in this way, the nonrealistic treatment of diegetic music is merely comparable to other kinds
of expressive devices in the cinema, such as the use of slow motion in action or fight scenes.

Diegetic Music and Spatially Displaced Sound

Whereas the issue of aural fidelity presents one theoretical trap in drawing a clear distinction between diegetic and
nondiegetic music, another exists with regard to the issue of offscreen sound. As many critics have noted, offscreen
sound offers filmmakers enormous potential for the creative use of sound. Events of the story can be communicated
without having to show them on screen. Offscreen sounds can add a richness of detail to the depiction of a particular
environment or milieu. Furthermore, in certain instances described in Michel Chion's analysis of acousmatic sound, the
imaginative use of an acousmetre, as in Psycho (1960) or The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932), may serve as an
effective snare in the narrational strategies of a Fritz Lang or Alfred Hitchcock.19

Whereas film theorists have long ago acknowledged the aesthetic and formal possibilities of offscreen sound,
music tends to be interpreted through a rather different lens by the viewers. Because the use of nondiegetic score is so
common in fiction filmmaking, one usually assumes that any music not clearly located in the story world is likely to be
nondiegetic. Although the music's performance forces, sound level, and narrative plausibility often redundantly reinforce its
status as nondiegetic score, the tacit assumption that such music is nondiegetic functions as a kind of default value for
viewers whether or not such cues are actually present.

Yet while such default assumptions certainly complicate the question of how we understand the distinction
between diegetic and nondiegetic music, they also do not furnish us with hard and fast rules. The association between
out-of-frame sound and nondiegetic music may be problematized by two particular aspects of storytelling in cinema: the
first involves the use of spatially displaced sound, and the second involves the communicativeness of a film's narration in
withholding information about the sound's relation to diegetic space. Spatially displaced sound is a phenomenon that has
not been adequately theorized in the literature on film sound and film music. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, for
example, identify the use of temporal displacement as one type of arrangement of sound and image. 20 In such moments,
the sound is nonsimultaneous with the image and may be either earlier or later than the events depicted on screen. Such
nonsimultaneous sounds are commonly found in sound bridges, in voice-over narration over images of past events, or in
aural flashbacks that signify a character remembering a line of dialogue or piece of music from earlier in the story.

But the temporal displacement of sound commonly presupposes a spatial displacement, as well. In other words,
sounds from earlier or later in the story are usually located in spaces different from those depicted on screen. While
temporal manipulations are the norm for scenes that involve displaced sounds, spatial displacement need not involve
temporal displacement. In relatively rare instances, sound is identified as simultaneous with an image on screen but
becomes detached from its location within the diegesis. As a rather simple example of this phenomenon, consider the
following extract from Walter Hill's 48 Hours (1982). In this sequence, we see the Bus Boys performing "The Boys Are
Back in Town" in a San Francisco nightclub for a group of dancers that includes Reggie Hammond, one half of the film's
pair of interracial buddies (Figure 14). Meanwhile, Reggie's unofficial partner, Jack Cates, drives to the club to meet up
with him (Figure 15). Hill's use of crosscutting indicates that the performance and the drive occur simultaneously.
Moreover, Hill adheres to the principles of continuity editing by using the diegetic performance underneath both lines of
action, thereby avoiding the abrupt shifts in sound space that would be produced by a strict alternation of music and
automobile sounds. In the shots of Jack's drive to the club, the Bus Boys' music functions as spatially displaced diegetic
sound that is mixed under the on-screen sounds of Jack's beloved Cadillac.

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 Figure 14.

Figure 15.

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 The sequence from 48 Hours is a rather simple and straightforward use of spatially displaced music. Filmmakers
also deploy this type of device in much more complex ways. One relatively common technique involves the continuation of
diegetic music under a scene even though the action has moved away from the visually depicted source of the music.
The Coen Brothers use this technique in the famous "Danny Boy" scene from Miller's Crossing (1990). Similarly, in
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), George Armitage exploits this device for the scene in which hitman Martin Blank attempts to
revisit his childhood home only to discover that it has been razed and replaced by a convenience store. Guns n' Roses'
cover of the James Bond chestnut "Live and Let Die" accompanies the scene and is initially motivated, like much of the
other music in the film, as a recording heard via Blank's car radio. However, the music continues under several shots that
underscore Blank exiting the car, staring dumbfounded at the absence of his childhood home, and then approaching the
entrance of the Ultimart. In previous essays on each of these films, I treated the apparent change in the music's spatial
status as a shift from diegetic to nondiegetic. However, upon further reflection, I am inclined to view each of these cues as
additional examples of spatially displaced sound.

An even more sophisticated use of this technique occurs in the following scene from Trainspotting (1997), Danny
Boyle's modern classic about four heroin addicts living in Edinburgh. The sequence begins inside Volcano, a nightclub
with loud music and dancing, patronized by the film's four protagonists and two of their girlfriends. Mark Renton espies
Diane, an underage schoolgirl we later find out, but a young woman whose rejection of an overeager and somewhat
foppish lothario shows maturity beyond her years (Figure 16). After downing the two drinks, Diane leaves the club, an
action shown in extreme long shot, followed by an even more distant view of Mark following her out of Volcano (Figure
17).

Figure 16.

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 Figure 17.

On the cut to the exterior of Volcano, the volume of the club's music, Sleeper's cover version of Blondie's
"Atomic," suddenly drops to match the soundscape of the outdoor urban environment. The music is still audible, but its
sounds are muffled by the building's walls and are mixed under the sounds of nearby traffic, the clunk of Diane's high
heels on the pavement, and Mark's bold, but inept, attempt at a come-on. Diane then queries Mark about the obvious
inanity of his pickup line, wondering aloud whether it has ever worked before, but then hypothesizing that its awkwardness
is an indication that Mark is really a shy, sensitive type hiding behind the bluster of his feigned assertiveness (Figure 18).
Diane then hails a cab, a seeming rebuff that leaves Mark sputtering and making excuses to go back into the club.
Throughout the dialogue and the eyeline matches that show Mark watching Diane's apparent departure, the music
continues at the low volume established by the earlier scene shift. When Mark realizes that the open cab door is the
elegant, nonverbal invitation for sex that contains everything his verbose pickup line lacked, the reversal of the situation is
reinforced by the cab driver's query about whether the gentleman is getting in or not. As Mark races toward the open
door, the music's swell in volume, coincident with a brief drum fill and a strong accent on the downbeat, disarticulates the
previous soundscape (Figure 19).

Figure 18.

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 Figure 19.

The music continues at this volume over the shot of Diane and Mark kissing inside the cab (Figure 20). The
music's level in the mix implies the norm for nondiegetic sounds within the syuzhet, but, in keeping with the earlier
discussion, it is really a manipulation of the music's fidelity for expressive purposes. Moreover, as was the case with the
example from 48 Hours, this shift in space does not negate the music's original location within the diegesis; it is here an
example of spatially displaced diegetic sound. As the sequence continues, though, we cut back to the exterior of the club
to show Gail explaining to a drunken Spud the conditions under which she will resume having sex with him. This is
followed by a series of shots outside Tommy and Lizzie's apartment as the couple prepares for their own nocturnal
fumblings (Figure 21). This last shot signals still another shift in the music's status within the diegesis as it now becomes
nonsimultaneous diegetic sound covering the evident ellipses as all three couples return to their residences. The music
will continue throughout the remainder of the scene, functioning as a device that unifies the constant crosscutting between
the three couples' coital misadventures.

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 Figure 20.

Figure 21.

The shifting relation of Sleeper's "Atomic" to the diegesis of Trainspotting is summarized in this chart:

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 Chart 1.

Diegetic Music and the Communicativeness of Film Narration

Finally, having suggested the conceptual utility of fidelity and spatially displaced sound as analytical tools in film
music analysis, I want to examine briefly a technique used by filmmakers that seems to be a prime example of Stilwell's
fantastical gap: music that begins at a volume level that is normatively heard as nondiegetic, but that then is revealed to
have a visible or implied source. The technique is an extremely common and is seen in two films that recently have
played in U.S. theaters. Iron Man (2008) begins with an establishing shot of U.S. military vehicles traveling down a rutted
dirt road as AC/DC's "Back in Black" begins playing on the film's sound track. Director Jon Favreau then cuts to an insert
of the music's source: a boom box strapped to the truck bed of a Humvee. The cut is accompanied by a sudden shift in
the music's volume and frequency range that communicates the song's change from expressive function to realistic
motivation. Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) includes a slightly more sophisticated example of this
device. In this instance, the music begins as a sound bridge covering the ellipsis and continues through the start of the
flashback. The music accompanies a lateral tracking shot that passes by several library stacks and finally comes to rest
on Kumar struggling to write a poem for a creative-writing class. Kumar is situated in the foreground of this shot with
several students at a second table positioned behind him. A boom box is visible on the table of the second group, and
Kumar angrily complains about the volume of their music. A young woman reluctantly complies with his request and turns
the music off. It is worth noting that the film offers no audible cues that reinforce its location within a realistic space; its
diegetic status is largely cued by the sudden silence that replaces the music.

Of course, these two scenes are contemporary counterparts to what is arguably the paradigmatic exemplar of this
technique, the famous "April in Paris" scene from Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974). The scene begins with Count
Basie's music accompanying a fade-in on Bart's Gucci saddlebag (Figure 22). The camera then pans left slightly and tilts
up to show his suede shirt and hat. A zoom back then reveals him seated on his horse, which is similarly dressed in
finery, a decorative bridle and harness girding its head and chest. Brooks then dissolves to a long shot of Bart riding
through a desert landscape (Figure 23). The camera tracks back to reframe Bart, but then reveals Basie and his orchestra
on an immaculate white bandstand in the middle of the desert (Figure 24). Bart and Basie exchange high fives in a
medium long shot that then tracks into a medium shot of the Count as Bart moves off screen. The music comes to a final
cadence for the last shot of the sequence, which shows Bart riding off into the distance.

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 Figure 22.

Figure 23.

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 Figure 24.

The scene contains one of the film's most famous gags--one that depends on the audience's initial
misapprehension of the music's status as nondiegetic. That, however, does not mean that it ever is nondiegetic. Nor does
it mean that the music was situated in a fantastical gap between diegetic and nondiegetic space. Rather, the gag is
produced as an effect of the film narration's communicativeness. As in the examples from Iron Man and Harold and
Kumar, the director has momentarily withheld information about the music's physical source within the world of the fiction.
The gag is not, properly speaking, caused by the manipulation of diegetic and nondiegetic space, but instead by the
viewer's assumption that fifties jazz could not plausibly be motivated within the arid landscapes of the Western desert.
Viewed this way, the gag derives its force from the way Brooks violates the norms for realistic motivation in cinema. One
might object that it is a rather unusual diegesis that motivates source music in this way, but that is an apt descriptor of
Blazing Saddles more generally, a film that shows railroad workers anachronistically crooning Cole Porter, a climactic
showdown between Bart and Hedley Lamarr taking place in present day Los Angeles outside of the film's premiere at
Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and the heroes riding in a limousine off into the sunset.

As you can see from these examples, Stilwell's theorization of a fantastical gap offers an all-too-blunt instrument
for film music analysis. Applied to these instances, the concept conflates an issue of narrative space with an effect of the
film's narration--two related but separate concepts that are correlated with the difference between the film's fabula and its
syuzhet. Indeed, this problem is particularly evident if we revisit one of Stilwell's principal examples, the sequence from
The Winter Guest discussed earlier. Whereas Stilwell attributes the ambiguity of the music's status to its place within the
fantastical gap, I submit that its spatial ambiguity is the product of the film's narration. Although the film offers some
reasons not to, if we agree with Stilwell's interpretation of the scene, then the filmmaker has simply suppressed
information about the music's location within the diegesis until the moment Frances says, "Listen. It's a boy playing
that."21

Conclusion

In offering a critique of the way that Stilwell has applied the concept of the fantastical gap, I do not wish to suggest
that the idea itself is without merit. Although I have argued that the notion of diegetic music should be divorced from the
concept of realism and, further, that the categories of aural fidelity, spatially displaced sound, and the communicativeness
of film narration provide a better set of tools for film music analysis, I would never claim that my model of diegetic and
nondiegetic music could explain every instance of apparent ambiguity. Some music in film will always hover between the
two categories, offering contradictory cues to viewers that can and will be interpreted in mutually exclusive ways.

Indeed, it seems to me that Stilwell's concept of the fantastical gap takes on more saliency in its connection with
what Gorbman calls metadiegetic music--music that is narrated or imagined by a particular character within a film.22
Metadiegetic music more consistently straddles the boundary between diegetic and nondiegetic because imagined music,
unlike source music, does not require a physical source to produce it as concrete, materialized sound. Because of this, it
can be very difficult to discern whether a musical cue is a representation of what a character is thinking or whether it
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simply communicates that information nondiegetically as a tool of the film's narration.23

Even granting that examples of metadiegetic music constitute a significant part of the fantastical gap, my goal in
this essay has been to suggest that the category may be less populous than current discussions of the boundary between
diegetic and nondiegetic music imply, largely because we have ignored certain conceptual categories that allow for a more
precise understanding of this phenomenon. I have argued that the burgeoning field of film music studies would benefit
from a clearer, more precise understanding of the difference between film narrative and film narration. This would not only
enable us to better understand the dichotomy between diegetic and nondiegetic music, but it also helps us understand
those cases where the distinction cannot be applied. In sum, if we want to understand the difference between source
music and score, we would be wise to return to the sources of the way these foundational concepts were first established.

Endnotes

1 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

2 See Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992), and The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004); Philip Tagg, Kojak: 50 Seconds of Television Music (New York: Mass Media Music Scholars
Press, 2000); Gillian Anderson, Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1988); Martin
Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997). Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1992), and How the West Was Sung: Music and the Westerns of John Ford (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007); K. J. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: British Film Institute, 2005),
and British Film Music and Musicals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Annahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking
Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2000); Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music
Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for
Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

3 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Athlone, 1994), 11–12.

4 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 22.

5 James Buhler, "Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analyzing Interactions of Film and
Music," in Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K. J. Donnelly (New York: Continuum, 2001), 40.

6 Étienne Souriau, ed., L'Univers filmique (Paris: Flammarion, 1953), 7. I have relied on Gorbman's translation of
Souriau's definition, which she quotes on page 21 of Unheard Melodies.

7 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1988), 17–18.

8 See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

9 David Neumeyer, "Performances in Early Hollywood Sound Films: Source Music, Background Music, and the
Integrated Soundtrack," Contemporary Music Review 19, no. 1 (2000): 37–62; and Robynn J. Stilwell, "The Fantastical
Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic," in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark,
Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 184–202.

10 Neumeyer, "Performances," 40–41.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 46.

13 Morris B. Holbrook, "The Ambi-Diegesis of 'My Funny Valentine,'" in Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema, ed.
Steve Lannin and Matthew Caley (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005), 48.

14 Stilwell, "Fantastical Gap," 187–88.

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 15 David Bordwell, for example, notes that depth staging is a particular technique that is specific to cinema insofar
as dramatized actions are recorded by the monocular perspective of the camera. In contrast, theater is staged for the
multiple points of perspective embodied by audience members within an auditorium, and thus tends toward a more lateral
approach to space. See Bordwell's discussion of early depth staging in On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 181–84.

16 Stilwell, "Fantastical Gap," 190.

17 Astute readers will note that I have not discussed the scholarship of Annahid Kassabian, who also rejects a
strict separation of the diegetic and nondiegetic realms (see Hearing Film, esp. 42–45). Kassabian finds a strict dichotomy
troubling because it "describes a 'film' prior to the music, that constructs its narratively implied world silently. This clearly
cannot be the case, since music (and sound more generally) contribute significantly to the construction of spatial relations
and time passage in narrative films" (42).

I will be frank in admitting that one reason for the exclusion of Kassabian's work from my review of the literature is
that I am not certain I completely understand the objection. This is partly attributable to the fact that I am not sure what
she means by "film" in the sentence just quoted (the quote marks suggest something different, though not specified, from
an ordinary understanding of the term). Likewise, I am also uncertain about what Kassabian means by "prior to." Perhaps
she means that the notion of diegetic space implies a physical world that exists before or is independent of the film's
signifying processes. If this is the case, then I would wholeheartedly agree that her objection is merited.

But this does not seem to me to be what most narratologists mean by diegesis in that the fictional universe
described by the term is neither physical nor a construct that precedes the discursive construction of the fiction. As I show
later in the essay, narratologists generally agree that the diegesis is a theoretical abstraction, something created by the
reader or viewer on the basis of information provided by the discourse of the literary or filmic text. Viewed this way,
Kassabian appears to have constructed a "straw man" argument that simply does not apply to theories of cinematic
narration, since sound and nondiegetic score are both a part of the discourse upon which the viewer constructs the story.

Moreover, Kassabian's objection seems especially empty when considered in relation to films of the silent era.
According to Richard Kozsarski, a 1922 survey by Motion Picture News led the trade journal to conclude that
approximately 15 percent of all theaters provided no live musical accompaniment to the films that they showed (see
Kozsarski, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Motion Picture, 1915–1928 [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990], 41). Admittedly, this figure seems inflated, because it includes theater owners who failed to
respond to the survey. Still, even if the figure was actually closer to 1 percent, these rare circumstances seem to have
provided exactly the kind of situation that Kassabian described as impossible: a film that constructs its narratively implied
world silently. Yet it would be equally implausible to suggest that viewers either (a) did not understand the film's story or
(b) believed that the world depicted in the film was a silent one. Printed intertitles, for example, function as part of the
cinematic discourse that communicates dialogue spoken from one character to another. Yet it seems absurd to think that a
viewer in the 1920s believed that the character within the diegesis understood that dialogue by reading it rather than
hearing it. As a counterexample, this seems to disprove Kassabian's objections tout court.

18 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008),
278.

19 See Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999).

20 Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 288–90.

21 Stilwell's reading of this cue ignores some other possibilities that are suggested by earlier scenes in the film.
For one thing, this revelation would not come as a complete surprise to the viewer. Indeed, Stilwell ignores a very early
scene in the film where Elspeth explicitly comments on the piano music and even sings along with the melody as Frances
glowers in the bath. Moreover, while most of the music is solo piano, a few cues in the film combine piano with a very
light accompaniment in the strings. Thus, while I would definitely agree that the last cue is revealed to be diegetic piano
music that continues as spatially displaced diegetic sound over the shots of Sam calling out for Tom, it is not clear that
the comment retrospectively recasts the piano music in its entirety.

22 See Stilwell, "Fantastical Gap," 194–96; and Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 22–23.

23 Love in the Afternoon (1957) offers a particularly instructive example of the ambiguities that may be created
through metadiegetic music. Consider the scene in which Ariane attempts to write a letter that will break her date for an
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afternoon tryst with Frank Flannagan, the aging American lothario that Ariane had rescued from a jealous husband the
previous night. When Ariane burns the letter moments after having written it, the reasons for her decision are clarified by
the music on the sound track, an orchestral rendering of "Fascination." The scene works precisely because it offers an
indirect indication of Ariane's feelings and emotional state; namely, that despite her better judgment, she is falling in love
with Flannagan).

While the narrative import of the cue is clear, it is not clear exactly how the cue actually functions. Arranged for
orchestra, the cue would not seem to be an aural memory on the part of Ariane; the film furnishes no evidence that Ariane
has heard the piece in any other version besides that performed by the Gypsy quartet as part of Flannagan's seduction
routine. It is possible, though, that the cue represents Ariane's imagined version of the song. Ariane is a musically gifted
cellist, and her mental rearrangement of the theme for orchestra might be fitting for a young woman prone to schoolgirl
fantasy, a trait well-established by her penchant for reading her father's investigative files, which are themselves replete
with affairs, passions, and broken hearts. Of course, the musical cue may also be nondiegetic, a tool of the narration that
merely communicates that Ariane is thinking of Frank. Viewed this way, "Fascination" functions as a leitmotif for Frank and
would thus play a kind of nominative function like that described by Justin London (see London's "Leitmotifs and Musical
Reference in the Classical Film Score," in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer
[Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999], 85–96.) I'm not sure I could claim that both of these readings are
equally possible, but they are, at least, both possible.

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